


so tonight I'm gonna cut it out and then restart

by cherryvanilla



Series: Yuletide Assignments and Treats [7]
Category: Blue Valentine (2010)
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-11-26
Updated: 2011-11-26
Packaged: 2017-10-26 13:54:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/283991
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cherryvanilla/pseuds/cherryvanilla
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i> “I am done with my graceless heart.”</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	so tonight I'm gonna cut it out and then restart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [exclamations](https://archiveofourown.org/users/exclamations/gifts).



> Title, Summary, and Lyrics by Florence and the Machine.

___________________________

_Regrets collect like old friends_

__________________________

You find yourself at age 30 wondering what happened to your life. You must have had feelings at one point, you must have been in love but somehow that’s all faded to dust and all you do each and every day is pick at the thought like a sore and wonder if anything in your life will ever change.

You’ve gotten used to being the one who is wrong, blamed for everything, big or small. You’ve gotten used to being indirectly told that nothing you do is right. He says he loves you but half the time you’re not even sure he likes you. He’s bitter; bitter with life, bitter with your success, bitter with the fact that he has to struggle for work while you have a steady job to go to and god help you for not hating it.

He resents your job, your achievements; he doesn’t need to voice the words, you know them with resolute certainty. If asked to pinpoint when everything changed, you really couldn’t be sure. Maybe your relationship has been tainted since he asked you to marry him, knowing full well it wasn’t his kid. Maybe from that moment in time, nothing was ever going to be the same again. You don’t regret your daughter but maybe you regret choosing him to be the father.

You’ve thought about leaving him nearly every day for at least two years. You look at him and feel disgust. You blame him for your own unhappiness, for the way he makes you feel; like you’re nothing special. He says he loves you but you don’t believe him for one second. Your grandmother told you love is shown, not told. He shows you nothing and you feel like a shell of a person in this house.

You never wanted to be a mother. You aren’t one for breakfast and story-time. You love her but sometimes she feels like an alien to you. Sometimes you just want to work and forget you have a family.

You’ve become the quintessential example of going through the motions. You’re everything you never wanted to be; a victim, a prisoner. With him, you feel as though you have no identity. Without him, be it at work or having drinks with the girls afterward, you feel comfortable in your own skin. Maybe it was his drinking that pushed you over the edge; starting at 8 o’clock in the morning and then bitching at you if you even questioned it. You’re supposed to accommodate him, accept him without question, yet he can tell you if you’re looking fat today, or to put on a higher cut shirt, or grill you about where the fuck you’ve been and who the fuck you’ve been with. There is no give and take. There’s no discussion. There’s one person who is right and one person who is wrong and half the time he made you believe in that dichotomy, broke you down to the point where fighting wasn’t worth it and resignation was all you knew.

Even throughout it all, you used to be able to find moments of happiness when you looked back into your past. The way he used to hold you, kiss you, the way he watched you dance and looked at you as if you were the most perfect person to ever exist on this planet. The way he’d whisper in your ear, “You’re beautiful,” and the words washed over you, lighting up your soul. Now, you think back and can’t find the good times, only the bad.

You see Bobby in the supermarket and you know it’s only revisionist history that has you fondly recalling your memories of him. You know you shouldn’t feel this way, shouldn’t feel a thrill when you look at him but there’s numbness inside you that you don’t know how to shake. Dean wants to take you away to a cheap motel and fuck and pretend your lives are fine, that you haven’t settled into something neither of you want yet don’t know how to get out of. Or he wants to fix them – actually address the problem rather than hiding behind silence (you) and booze (him). You’re not sure if that’s worse than the avoidance.

You’re not sure how much longer you can tolerate the situation in which the two of you have created through passivity. You’re not sure when you stopped recognizing yourself in the mirror. He cuts you with his words and that bright-eyed, passionate, fascinating guy you fell in love with is nowhere behind the pupils you look into every day.

So you do it, you make the move, pushed to your breaking point. You’re tired of being angry at him, tired of him being angry at _you_ , tired of being the one who is considered the bad guy every day of your life. You do it amidst fireworks after he created his own at your job, your _job_ for Gods sakes and yet it was still all your fault somehow. You do it and watch him leave, watch your daughter run after him. You do it and you feel like a weight has been lifted off your chest at the same time that you feel as though your heart has been crushed. He was supposed to be your life, your everything. He was supposed to make you happy, be the one thing you could depend on, to turn to when the rest of the world went dark. You were supposed to live for one another but you ended up living for your child. Maybe everyone does that when they become parents but there still needed to be something more, something to hold on to. He wanted to stay because of her, so she wouldn’t be broken. How can you even explain to him that you’ve been just that for years now?

He liked to believe your song was the one he played in the motel room. You never thought of it as the song that defined the both of you. Instead, over the years, you ended up comparing yourselves to the one he sang to you that night on the street. When you compare your relationship to a song that bleak, maybe it wasn’t worth saving.

Part of you thinks you’ll weaken, go back to him, fall prisoner to memories that don’t hurt and pictures in frames. Part of you just wants him to love you unconditionally like he once did, before the years of knowing one another far better than you ever could, and realizing all the things you dislike, got in the way.

Love should last. You wanted to believe in that.

You wanted to believe in him.

You’re not sure if you ever believed in either.

___________________________

 _I’m always dragging that horse around_  
And our love is pastured such a mournful sound  
Tonight I'm gonna bury that horse in the ground

___________________________


End file.
